Bits and Bites....

* Yesterday we celebrated Christiaan's 9th birthday. We celebrated with a party at the pool. That morning we had given him his gifts and he was pretty pumped about the digital watch we gave him.

* About once a month a load of vegetables is sent from an interior village to an expat woman here in Sentani. She sends out an email and we all go to her house to buy. They grow nice white potatoes, sweet potatoes, green peppers, and celery in this village. It is too humid here in Sentani. The celery available here is called soup leaves and that's just what it is, leaves. The celery from the village doesn't come in big bunches of stalks, but individual sticks that are thinner than you would buy in Canada. Anyways, it was to this place I was going to buy celery with Brynnie on my motorbike. We weren't far down our road when suddenly there was in the middle of the road a rather inebriated fellow whose shirt was covered in blood. There was a friend on either side of him. I stopped, unsure of what to do when his friends motioned for me to go by. At the moment he looked up at me and said, "Orang Barat!" (Westerner!) and lunged at me. I gunned my motor but in the heat of the moment I forgot that I was in third gear so I didn't zip ahead as quickly as I would have liked, but it was fast enough to avoid the clutches of this man. Thankfully.... I just wanted to buy some celery....

* Last month a woman from our church had come to my door asking to borrow money because her husband was in another city far away attending the funeral of a brother and her son had been sick for a couple days and she wanted to take him to the doctor. She asked to borrow 300,000 rupiahs, which is for them quite a lot of money. I kind of thought it was a bit much for going to the doctor but I know that her husband is a trustworthy man and I wanted to help, so I gave her the money. (Normally we have a policy that we do not lend money) In retrospect she seemed rather nervous and anxious and didn't really listen to the advice I gave her regarding her son. She promised to pay the money back at the end of the month. Well, the end of the month was two weeks ago and I hadn't heard a thing from them. So yesterday I got up the guts to go to their house to talk with them about it. She wasn't home, thankfully. I told her husband about it and he replied that he did not know his wife had borrowed money and that he had told her before that she should not borrow from others. So maybe that was why she hadn't told him.... He was ready to pay me back the money right then and there but it is a lot of money for them so I told him that maybe he should discuss it with his wife and then maybe pay us back over 2 or 3 months. I felt really bad for him and I realized that I shouldn't lend that much money to people who don't work for me. Live and learn....